Clinical chemistry applications of capillary electromigration methods

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) and related electromigration techniques have a wide range of potential applications in clinical laboratories. Advantages of these methods versus traditional electrophoretic techniques for clinical testing include their efficiency, speed, small sample requirements, ease of automation, and ability to be used with a variety of detection schemes. This chapter provides a review on the use of CE and related techniques for various types of analytes that are of interest in clinical testing. Methods that have been used in this work have included capillary zone electrophoresis, CE-based enzyme assays, CE immunoassays, micellar electrokinetic chromatography, nonaqueous CE, capillary gel electrophoresis, affinity CE, and capillary isoelectric focusing. Areas of clinical chemistry in which these methods have been employed, and which will be discussed in this review, include protein profiling, hematology, enzymology, immunology, endocrinology, therapeutic drug monitoring, toxicology, the detection of tumor biomarkers, and DNA diagnostics.